McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
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Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#2> McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
So that's a lie.
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/McDonalds-acquires-Israeli...
Remember in 2006 how they outsourced the drive in windows to a call centre in Hawaii, how did that turn out?
Did it immediately sack everyone one or did it not work out?
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...
Yes, yes AI will kill jobs, what we don't know is when.
This article contributes nothing.
All evidence is AI/voice gen is to immature yet, since nothing is actually implemented by McDonald's nothing contradicts this yet.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#3I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands.
I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc.
What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers re-doing their order at the payment window because the voice AI completely screwed up their order.
I think mobile ordering through an app is a much more viable option.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#4I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
I'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct.
Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do the task instead of humans.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#5I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
Siri and Google Assistant are much more (intentionally?) gimped than the state of the art. But I don't have any faith in McDonald's version either.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#6Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu...
@dang can we get the URL changed?
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#7I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
On screen confirmations should cut down on those issues.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#8I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
Siri and Google Assistant are much more (intentionally?) gimped than the state of the art. But I don't have any faith in McDonald's version either.
Google Assistant gimped? How so?
You make it sound like google could just flip a switch and the assistant would magically work better. If it were that simple, why would they intentionally limit the platform?
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#9I am not sure voice based AI is up to the task. Even with a headset/mic Google Assistant and Siri have problems with more complicated commands. I am not sure how well the tech will hold up to the effects of wind, car engine sounds, screaming kids, customizations (hold the pickles), accents, etc. What I think will happen is that they will roll out this technology, and then be faced with a bunch of irritated customers…
I'm not sure when the last time you tried the assistant was, but Google's speech-to-text is getting ridiculously good. I think most of the time, it would be able to get even complicated orders correct. Anyways, I'm sure that for the 10% where it doesn't work, they can install an interactive touchscreen for correcting orders (or have an app). And for the 90% of the rest, they save a ton of money by having computers do…
Have you seen people order? I would shoot half the customers if I worked a fast food counter much less the drive through.
Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs
#10Much better article about this direct from McDonalds - https://news.mcdonalds.com/stories/company-news-details/acqu... @dang can we get the URL changed?
Yeah. That's a much better article. They're buying a company to work on it.
It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I remember a Microsoft presentation from Build 2016 (ish ?) where the presenter was showing a natural language query product where they used food ordering as an example.
I thought it was super cool the way they trained it. The computer would guess everything it could and then a human would shuffle boxes of words around to fix mistakes / assign unknown variables. The coolest part was where they showed how they could teach the computer that "my crib" was slang for my home location.
It's one of those things where I figured it would be big deal and then I never heard about it again. I can't even remember what it was called.
In this case, I imagine they could do something similar. As long as the computer can do good enough speech to text, there can be a human in there somewhere fixing up the tough stuff.
I imagine it's a prelude to ordering directly from your phone as you're driving to pick up the food.